Maximum PC directx 11 RSS Feed

DirectX 11 Comes To Vista

Justin Kerr — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 09:00:32 -0500

Microsoft launched Windows 7 with full DirectX 11 support, but until now, Vista users running ATI’s newest 5000 series cards were left out in the cold. Its not like you’ve been waiting months to play the newest DX11 titles, but at least you now have the comfort of knowing that you don’t need to upgrade your OS in order to take advantage of your new GPU.

DirectX 11 isn’t a massive leap forward over the DirectX 10.1 found in Vista SP2, and in fact, is actually a superset implemented using WDDM (Windows Display Drive Model). Windows XP users will need to continue making do with DirectX 9 because it is not compatible with WDDM, and Microsoft has been pretty clear that this isn’t likely to change anytime soon.

The platform update KB971644 should be delivered to Vista users automatically via Windows update. Now all you need is an Radeon 5870. DirectX 11 support in Vista seems as good a reason as any don’t you think?

Supposed First DirectX 11 Benchmark Released for Download

Ryan Whitwam — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:15:45 -0500

If you have a shiny new DirectX 11 card taking up space in your case, this may be of interest to you. The first DX11-specific benchmark has been released by Unigine Corp. The demo is called “Heaven” and runs on the company’s proprietary Unigine engine.

Unigine have released two previous GPU benchmarking demos called “Sanctuary” and “Tropics”. Like those programs, the new DX11 benchmark is available for free. Heaven has support for OpenGL, DirectX 9, 10, and 11. So regardless of your hardware, it should run as long as you have at least 256 MB of VRAM. There’s even support for AMD’s new Eyefinity technology.

You will, however, need .NET framework 2.0, OpenAL, and your card’s latest stable drivers. If you want to take your card for a spin, you can get the Heaven demo here.

ATI Targets Windows 7 Machines, Makes DirectX 11 Mainstream with GPU Launch

Bart Salisbury — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:38:18 -0500

ATI plans to celebrate next week’s Windows 7 launch with two new DirectX 11 graphics cards. The Radeon HD 5770 and the Radeon HD 5750 will each sport 1GB of GDDR5 memory, and have core clock speeds of 850Mhz and 700Mhz respectively. Other features include two dual-link DVI ports, a HDMI port, and a single 6-pin PCI-E power connector.

The Radeon 5700 series card will be built upon ATI’s new 40nm “Juniper” chip, which consists of 1.04 billion transistors on a 166mm² die. The smaller chip makes it possible to ATI to offer the cards at lower prices than the current DirectX 11 capable Radeon 5800 series cards: the HD 5870 and HD 5850. Price for the HD 5770 is set at $159, with the HD 5750 going for $129. ATI will later release a 512MB version of the HD 5750 for $109.

Image Credit: ATI

White Paper: DirectX 11

Michael Brown — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:00:00 -0500

You thought DX10 brought big changes? Get a load of DX11!

DirectX 10 marked a radical departure from DirectX 9: In order to be compatible, a graphics processor must feature a unified architecture in which each shader unit is capable of executing pixel-, vertex-, and geometry-shader instructions. The changes in DirectX 11 aren’t quite as fundamental, but they could have just as big an impact—and not only with games.

DirectX 11 is a superset of DirectX 10, so everything in DirectX 10 is included in the new collection of APIs. In addition, DX11 offers several new features and three additional stages to the Direct3D rendering pipeline: the Hull Shader, the Tessellator, and the Domain Shader. And in an effort to deliver cross-hardware support for general-purpose computing on graphics processors, Microsoft has come up with a new Compute Shader.

DirectX 11 will be compatible with both Vista and Windows 7, but many of its graphics features will be available on GPUs designed for previous iterations of Direct3D. Tapping into the Tessellator’s power, however, will require a GPU with transistors dedicated to the task (in this sense, DX11 marks a slight departure from DX10’s vision of a unified architecture). Let’s explore the concept of tessellation now.

Meet Tess

The three new pipeline stages we mentioned earlier are all related to tessellation. They reside in the geometry-processing stage, between the Vertex Shader and the Geometry Shader. Tessellation can rapidly create the primitive elements that go into the creation of a complex three-dimensional object by subdividing just a few at a time. In this case, the primitives are called patches, which are defined by control points (visualize Photoshop’s pen tool, except that DX11’s control points manipulate a surface instead of a line). Patches replace the triangles used in previous versions of DirectX. Each subsequent subdivision creates more primitives, with each group being smaller than the last. Increasing the number of primitives in a model makes that model look more realistic. The Tessellator can also reshape these primitives by adjusting the control points to form more complex geometry.

While it’s very easy for GPUs to produce coarse objects like cubes, they have a much harder time creating objects with smooth curves. By tessellating a coarse object, a cube, for example—a GPU can transform that object into something that does have smooth curves, such as a sphere—and the kicker is that this process requires relatively little GPU horsepower and graphics memory.

(click to enlarge)

Here’s a broad overview of how tessellation works: The Vertex Shader outputs patches, which then travel down the pipeline to the Hull Shader. The Hull Shader analyzes the patches’ control points to determine how the Tessellator should be configured (generating so-called “tessellation factors”) and then sends the patches on to the Tessellator. The Tessellator, in turn, subdivides the patches and feeds a stream of points to the Domain Shader. The Domain Shader manipulates these points to form the appropriate geometry and sends the resulting vertices to the Geometry Shader.

Hardware tessellation isn’t a new concept. Animators at Pixar began using tessellation to create their highly detailed characters beginning with A Bug’s Life, and they’re still using it today. The GPU that AMD designed for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 gaming console features a tessellation unit, and AMD integrated something similar in its Radeon GPUs for the PC, beginning with the Radeon HD 2000 series. This led many to predict that Microsoft would expose tessellation in DirectX 10. But that didn’t happen, and DirectX 11 won’t be able to tap AMD’s tessellator, either, because AMD’s original implementation of the technology isn’t compatible with Microsoft’s.

I Compute, Therefore I Am

If you’ve followed the evolution of modern GPUs, you know that they’ve moved from being single-core processors designed for one specific purpose—processing graphics—to massively parallel devices with hundreds of processing cores. Modern GPUs are capable of performing more than a trillion floating-point operations per second, which has been a boon for the types of graphics processing and real-time animation needed for computer gaming. But this hardware can be tapped to perform other types of computations, too; the concept is known as GPGPU computing (the acronym stands for general-purpose graphics processing unit). Most software applications, however, as well as the tools used to develop them, are designed for serial execution, not parallel.

GPGPU computing, therefore, requires brand-new tools, and AMD and Nvidia have invested significant amounts of time and effort to both create them and spur the development of GPGPU applications. AMD’s initiative is known as Stream SDK (Software Development Kit) and Nvidia’s is called CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture). The growth of GPGPU computing, however, has been hindered by the fact that each company’s tools work with only that company’s GPU. Microsoft hopes to change that with the addition of the Compute Shader to DirectX 11. The Compute Shader will enable developers to write GPGPU code that will run on any graphics processor, be it Nvidia’s GeForce platform, AMD’s Radeon, or Intel’s upcoming Larabee.

Although the Compute Shader is integrated with DirectX 11, it’s not actually a stage in the Direct3D pipeline. It can, however, take data structures from the Pixel Shader stage, manipulate them using the GPU’s resources, and then apply them to the final image in a post-processing stage. Microsoft has identified a range of target applications specifically related to graphics processing that should improve games, including effects physics (particles, smoke, water, cloth, etc.), ray tracing, gameplay physics, and even AI.

Analysts expect the first DirectX 11–compatible GPUs to reach the market in the fourth quarter; games that take advantage of DirectX 11 aren’t expected until sometime in 2010.

AMD Demos DX11 Hardware Running at QuakeCon

Justin Kerr — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 23:01:39 -0500

DirectX 11 which will debut with the release of Windows 7 is arguably a pretty big deal. The new APIs will enjoy a much larger installed base than its predecessor thanks to backwards compatibility with Vista, and graphical improvements that were teased in DirectX 10 should see a pretty significant performance boost. With the release of Windows 7 nearly upon us, many have been holding off on GPU upgrades until the DX11 parts to start rolling off the line, and this time it appears AMD will beat Nvidia out of the gate with its “Evergreen” series.

This hunch was further re-enforced by a live hands on demonstration provided to PC Perspective at QuakeCon showing a working DX11 graphics card in action. The GPU code named “Future Card” was running several live DirectX 11 SDK simulations, but even more impressive was its ability to launch and run existing DirectX 9 titles. Its one thing to show a tech demo, but it’s even more impressive to prove you have a fully functional card.

It looks like the Radeon HD 5000 series will among the first DX11 cards on the market, and AMD could well be on track for a late 2009 release. Is the race to DirectX 11 a battle Nvidia can afford to lose?

Windows 7 Gets Optimized For Intel Chips

Justin Kerr — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 16:05:45 -0500

Writing an operating system is no easy task, particularly for Microsoft. Having to design a piece of software that will maintain compatibility across a nearly infinite number of hardware configurations can be a daunting mission. It becomes even more difficult when hardware manufacturers implement new technologies, but the software lags behind.

Determined to not let that happen to Windows 7, Microsoft engineers have reportedly worked side by side with Intel to optimize support for its processors. In a posting made on the new Windows 7 partner blog, Microsoft’s Brandon LeBlanc highlights the results of the collaboration. “Working with Intel, Microsoft implemented a new feature called SMT parking, which provided additional support for the Windows 7 scheduler for Intel Hyper-threading Technology, enabling better performance on hyper-threaded, multi-core Intel processors.”Intel and Microsoft have also been working on optimizing boot/ shutdown/ sleep/ and resume times, which could end up giving the chipmaker a substantial edge in performance for the foreseeable future.

Intel’s rival Nvidia also posted a follow up on the partner blog outlining GPGPU functions in Windows 7, and encouraged upgraders to spring for dedicated graphics cards. Ultimately the Intel announcement is more interesting since the DX Compute found in DirectX 11 will favor both ATI and Nvidia equally and it certainly makes me worry about the growing performance gap between Intel and AMD.

Will this announcement influence your upgrade decision?

Edit: Brandon LeBlanc works for Microsoft, not Intel.

AMD Betting on DX11 to Launch it Ahead of Nvidia

Andy Salisbury — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:37:15 -0500

According to Rick Bergman, AMD’s Senior Vice President for Platforms, he and his crew are looking to beat Nvidia to the world of DX11.

According to Bergman, “We want to supply hardware to Microsoft and software developers so they can make DX11 games on our hardware first.” This would put AMD ahead of Nvidia, something that hasn’t happened for several years, thanks to Nvidia’s dominance in the DX10 market. “We were kind of fighting from behind, but with DX11 it feels like we’re ahead this round.”

Despite reports that very few game titles would take advantage of DX11, Bergman is keeping up his enthusiasm. Reportedly, he knows of a handful of independent software vendors that are working “eagerly” to release games.

Image Credit: AMD

AMD Demos First DirectX 11 GPU

Paul Lilly — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 09:47:14 -0500

During a press conference at Computex, AMD gave the world's first official DirectX 11 GPU demonstration, saying the new API will debut before the end of 2009. When it does, AMD promised it would beat the competition to the punch and "deliver DirectX 11 first."

"Games and other applications are about to get a lot better as a result of AMD's new graphics hardware and DirectX 11," AMD stated in a press release. "DirectX 11 features such as tessellation will bring consumers higher quality, superior performing games making use of 6th generation AMD technology."

AMD also said its DX11-based videocards will improve Windows 7 performance in a wide number of applications and in a way that's "completely transparent to users," such as accelerating the conversion of video playback on portable media players.

Catch the full press release here.

Image Credit: AMD